Post by healthy11 on Aug 19, 2014 8:24:39 GMT -5
I heard a report by Charles Osgood yesterday, regarding a study by George Mason University in Virginia, on short-term memory. A portion of the transcript follows:
"It is so easy - altogether too easy - to get distracted when we're in the middle of something, isn't it? Perhaps by a loud noise outside...or perhaps by a bunch of people around you, all chattering away at once...Concentration can be difficult in those circumstances - and it doesn't take much to short-circuit our short-term memory, either.
Researchers at George Mason University in Virginia asked people to outline and also answer a written exam question. But, while they were in the middle of doing that, they would be interrupted - and asked to do math problems before going back to the written exam.
The result was that 95 percent of those people who were interrupted for the math break wrote poorer answers for their written exam. And they also wrote less - because apparently they ran out of ideas that they might have had whirring in their heads before they were interrupted.
The researchers conclude that just one minute of interruptions can short-circuit our short-term memory, and have a very negative impact on the work that we are trying to do before we get distracted. It is something to think about, since a lot of us are so attached to our smartphones these days - which we check an average of 125 times a day. That's right - 125 times.
Now, I'm trying to remember what I was doing before I told you about all of this..."
"It is so easy - altogether too easy - to get distracted when we're in the middle of something, isn't it? Perhaps by a loud noise outside...or perhaps by a bunch of people around you, all chattering away at once...Concentration can be difficult in those circumstances - and it doesn't take much to short-circuit our short-term memory, either.
Researchers at George Mason University in Virginia asked people to outline and also answer a written exam question. But, while they were in the middle of doing that, they would be interrupted - and asked to do math problems before going back to the written exam.
The result was that 95 percent of those people who were interrupted for the math break wrote poorer answers for their written exam. And they also wrote less - because apparently they ran out of ideas that they might have had whirring in their heads before they were interrupted.
The researchers conclude that just one minute of interruptions can short-circuit our short-term memory, and have a very negative impact on the work that we are trying to do before we get distracted. It is something to think about, since a lot of us are so attached to our smartphones these days - which we check an average of 125 times a day. That's right - 125 times.
Now, I'm trying to remember what I was doing before I told you about all of this..."